Shannon Walsh

Shannon Walsh is a filmmaker, researcher, writer and activist. Her primary research uses participatory visual methodologies to support social activism in Canada and South Africa. Shannon is a Research Fellow with the Centre for Civil Society at UKZN. She describes Durban as a bundle of contradictions: oppression, noise, beauty, resistance, silence, anger, unity, frustration, laughter and confrontation, from which she can’t keep away.

In her chapter, ‘If you don’t die first’: Fire, water and women in the shack settlements of Durban, Shannon keys in on how ‘for many of the poorest of the poor, little seems to have changed since the end of apartheid.’ She focuses on shack dwellers living in euphemistic ‘informal settlements’. These are make-shift dwellings put together with scraps of metal around Durban and other cities in South Africa. She writes about Abahlali baseMjondolo, the shackdwellers’ movement campaigning around the slogan ‘No Land! No House! No Vote!’ The movement has tried to raise public consciousness about the appalling conditions they have to put up with and how the ‘political system has failed [them] so significantly.’

Reference:
Walsh, Shannon. '‘If you don’t die first’: Fire, water and women in the shack settlements of Durban', in Rob Pattman and Sultan Khan (Eds.), Undressing Durban (Durban: Madiba Press, 2007), pp. 156-165.